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Before we jump into this conversation, a quick word from the guys over at Swim Nerd. Are you looking for a pace clock that won't break the bank? How about one that every swimmer can see? The Swim Nerd pace clock is the most innovative and affordable digital pace clock the world has ever seen. Their nine-inch tall green LEDs are specifically made for outdoor viewing and are visible from 100 meters away. Bluetooth enabled, it connects to your swim practice mobile app, allowing you to program any set your heart desires. Take a minute, go to swimpractice.com and check out their amazing new pace clock. It truly is the world's best swimming pool pace clock. That's swimpractice.com. One more time, because I really want you to take a look at this. The pace clock is the most quintessential piece of training equipment for any swim team. Go to swimpractice.com and get yourself the best pace clock in the world. Your swimmers will thank you. This week on the swim brief, a special mystery guest. I'm trying something new. Stay tuned after the music to hear more. And I know what you're asking yourself. You're thinking, uh, Chris, is are you just doing this because you couldn't find anybody to come on the podcast with you this week? And I will admit that uh for various reasons, I wasn't able to find somebody to come on the podcast this week. I think, uh, and I'm working on a couple theories as to why that is, I do think, um, and I gosh, I I have a hard time even saying this, but I I think that, you know, there was so much controversy coming out of the Gary Taylor podcast, and some of the things he said on there, I think were just so shocking to people, um, that uh, you know, quite frankly, some other people have shied away from coming on here. And so I'm I'm gonna have uh maybe a few weeks here to work through that. I'm just kidding, Gary. You you were great. Um uh I'm gonna have a few weeks to work through that here. But I also uh one thing I've been thinking about doing for a long time is having some podcasts where I talk about very specifically uh some positive psychology topics as they apply to coaching swimming, because that is what my business is all about. Um I I get frequently asked this question when I talk to people on the phone. I spend pretty much every week uh engaging people on the phone, and uh more often than not people end up coming to me and saying, uh, yeah, so what is it exactly that you do? Um and so I want to give everybody that follows the blog and follows a podcast uh a little taste of that. Um I'm going to talk about some of the stuff that when I go out and talk to teams or talk to coaches uh clinics, um what kind of uh topics I present on. And today I want to talk about learned optimism, which is something that uh pretty much everywhere I've gone I have ended up talking about. And I should preface before I even get started talking about learned optimism that with each one of these topics I have a slightly different way that I present the information depending on who the audience is. I like to have audiences segmented. So that is to say, uh what I will present today will kind of be a coach's version of how I talk about learned optimism. That that is, it's designed for coaches as the listener. So if you're not a coach, just realize that the way that I'm gonna talk about it is not uh entirely fitted to you. I have a version of this that I present uh somewhat differently when I talk to swimmers and the athletes on a team, and I have a version that is different when I talk to parents. But when I was thinking about this podcast and and which of these versions should I should I shoot just for the middle or what, I I realized that the majority of the audience of people that listen to this podcast are coaches. So I'm going to talk to the coaches. On to learned optimism. You know, this is probably the topic that got me interested in positive psychology way back when, in the first place. I remember that I was at some sort of fancy pants dinner party. Um I don't really remember who I was talking to. That'd be a good detail to remember in this story, but uh I had uh started coaching at the University of Pennsylvania, and uh it was something around Penn that I was attending, and somebody uh who was there was going on and on about this book. They said, you know, there's a researcher here who's doing some really amazing work, and uh they've just started a graduate program uh in this field that he came up with called positive psychology, and you really should read one of his books. Um and the book that she remend recommended to me, this woman, was a book by Martin Seligman. It's called Learned Optimism. Now, um uh I would recommend anybody listening that's interested to definitely read this book. What I will say is if you're interested in um a sort of broader picture uh of positive psychology, I think that uh a lot of the best ideas and stuff that was in learned optimism ended up uh and and some and some things that uh Seligman learned down the line end up getting summed up in a book that he wrote uh just as I was finishing the graduate program uh um somewhere around 2009, I think it was published, uh, called Flourishing. So either one of those books, I recommend them both. Um, but if you want a more sort of comprehensive vision, go for flourishing. And but learned optimism, that was the book that really hooked me into talking about optimism, to wanting to learn more about optimism and how it worked. Um and the core the core idea uh around learned optimism that I end up talking about when I get out with these various audiences, and and again we're gonna talk about coaches here, is that I think in many cases uh people can envision that you know an optimism optimism or pessimism is kind of just a quality in people, maybe a fixed trait, you know, some people are more optimistic than others. And the really the core idea here is that in fact there are uh ways to learn to be more optimistic, that optimism is a skill um that is much like any other skill. Like when I'm when I'm uh uh talking to coaches about this, I often bring up, you know, um, flip turn is a skill, right? Uh swimming breaststroke properly is a skill, and there are little skill components within that. So just in the same way, you can spend some time training and working on and consciously uh improving uh uh one of those skills, you can do the same with optimism. And uh I I'm gonna make an argument for why it's worth doing that, why I absolutely think you should do it, uh, especially if you're a coach, because um working on your own optimism, and this is another thing that I end up saying uh very specifically to coaches, is that I I I suggest that they work on their own first. I many coaches uh quickly jump to oh, this is great, I want to start using this as a tool with my swimmers. I I strongly urge anybody who is interested to, you know, uh do your homework and start with yourself. Okay. Um, you know, use yourself because there's going to be a little bit of troubleshooting, uh, especially on the front end, uh, and I'm going to hopefully get you started on the right path. But uh I think that you know you you you definitely want to work through some of that troubleshooting yourself so that when you feel really confident in it and you start doing it with other people that you have worked through some of that. And and I will briefly touch on a little bit of that troubleshooting later on. But uh as we talk about specifically optimism as a skill and as it relates to coaching, I think another sort of big um big picture thing that I see with people is that there's a lot of resistance to optimism. Uh there's a resistance, I think partially because of some broader misunderstandings of what optimism is. And I think a lot of things that uh people uh would label as realism, you know, that they would say, well, I'm just being realistic, are actually quite pessimistic. And finally, I think that uh one of the big misunderstandings is that people do not understand how naturally pessimism comes to all of us. And so I'm gonna talk a little bit about that um along the way so that uh so that you can get a picture of some of these bigger bigger items. So what is optimism? Well, uh the the the textbook definition here um for the purposes is how you explain events, and that's what's known as explanatory style. And let me explain a little bit what explanatory style is, and that is something happens, okay, some some event happens, you have an emotional reaction, however small or big, to that thing that happens. And after you have that emotional reaction, the rational part of your brain works on explaining it. Now, here's here's a place where we often get tricked because um it happens so fast that our our brain starts working on explaining something that we often think that the explanation that is like the our sort of uh thoughts about why or or how we came to feel that way, um came before the feeling, but the feeling comes first and the explanation comes second, and that's kind of a crucial thing for understanding um optimism. One other thing that I often point out in a swim coaching setting is that um there's actually been some research done on optimism and swimmers. Um Seligman, who I mentioned earlier as the author of Learned Optimism, uh went to the University of California and along with uh Nort Thornton and some others, did research with the University of California Swim Team in 1990, uh specifically around optimism. Uh and um when I was studying positive psychology, I actually took the study that Seligman and Thornton did and uh tried to tweak it uh along the way that many I saw many swim coaches doing to see whether whether it worked and what the implications of that were. And I'll talk a little bit more about that later. But this specific uh uh study uh is pretty interesting. You know, it is 28 years old, so and there are some caveats you can take with that. Um certainly uh we know more about optimism than we did in 1990, uh, but there there's definitely something to be clean to that, and I'll talk about that a little bit. But first, let's finish defining optimism. As I said, it's something you can train and improve. It's like a muscle. Um and the more you work on it, the stronger you get. Uh obviously, you just like any other kind of training, yeah, you you you could over-train. Um so there is too much working on it. Um, but in general, most of us are are really not that close to working on it too much. And if we go back to to talking about explanatory style, uh optimism involves your explanations around both good, quote, quote unquote, and quote unquote bad events. And uh I will get a little bit more specific later about what it means that an event is good or bad, but the the simple definition of it is that a good event is something that you're feeling some positive emotion about, and a bad event is something that you know you're feeling a negative emotion about. So that's how you sort of code those two. Um here are some things that optimism is not. It and and this is really key because I think a lot of these uh tend to be lumped into people's definition of optimism. Optimism has nothing to do with pretending that bad things do not happen and do not exist. Okay, that they have nothing to do with uh you know, sort of that image of skipping along, you know, not having a care in the world, and just sort of ignoring bad events. That's actually a key part of optimism is the thoughts that you form around events that make you feel a negative emotion. So ignoring those is not a part of optimism. Um it's not about setting setting unrealistic expectations for yourself. So I think that one of the um things that people often associate with optimism is like, okay, uh I um I'm feeling really optimistic about how much uh I can run. So I'm gonna go from not running to running 10 miles a day. That's not optimism. Um that's that's uh that's just being completely unrealistic in your expectations for what you can do. Um very crucially, it has nothing to do with lying to yourself or those around you. In fact, um a crucial part about optimism, and this is something when I work with people one-to-one, that I often end up talking through with them as I work uh with them to get some more uh optimistic explanations, is how much do you believe the explanations that you're giving to yourself right now? Because it's really crucial that as people work on their explanations and the thoughts that come out of events, that they uh that they're able to feel that those thoughts are authentic. And finally, and here's here's a real swimming uh specific one that that I've just seen in my own experience coaching, is uh optimism is not about continuing to push ahead without reflection about went wrong. Um and I I give credit to uh my colleague Caroline Miller, and you can hear her on an earlier podcast for naming this uh very specific well, I don't know that it's entirely specific to swimming, but we've both seen it a lot in swimming. We call it stupid grit. Um grit is something that's very popular um in uh in especially in the sports world now, a very popular positive psychology topic. But um, you know, the perseverance is great, but uh we don't want perseverance where people just end up doing the same thing over and over again without thinking, hmm, uh what could I change and and what could I do to get better? So let's talk a little bit about this study that I referenced earlier that was done at University of California in the 19 in 1990. Um swimmers that there's a test for explanatory style. It's uh it's changed a bit since 1990. Um in fact, I think at the time, I'm not sure it was called explanatory style. This this I'm not 100% sure on. It might have been called attributional style. But swimmers were tested, given this test for optimism. And actually, um that wasn't the only way they coded the swimmers for optimism. They also had the coaches uh give a sort of subjective rating. Um so in any sense, using these two measures, they coded swimmers for optimism, and then they had them step up and swim a race. They were uh racing either a hundred or a two hundred or a four hundred. Okay, so they stepped up, swim, you know, swim such and such a race as face as fast as you possibly can. Afterwards, the sw the the coaches called out times. Okay. Crucially, they told them they went slower. So, for example, in this study, whatever they swam for a hundred, they were told they went a second and a half slower. So you let's say you swam a hundred and your time was fifty point four. Well, the time you heard was fifty-one nine. Okay. Um, so you know, swimmers were basically um uh in most cases given uh at least a mildly negative event, right? You know, they they went out and they swam their hardest and they didn't go very fast. Um and uh especially when you're dealing with a group of really, you know, really competitive, high-end people, um, they're gonna be they're gonna have a negative reaction to that. It's a that's natural to feel that way emotionally. But what was really crucial was they then gave them basically an hour to cool down, relax, um, recover. And uh, you know, if you read the actual study, there's a pretty good description of how some of the more pessimistic people reacted uh to this false negative time. It was not good. Uh they were not feeling uh they were not feeling at their best uh after that initial swim. But the people who uh had been coded as optimistic, uh actually a majority of them were able to swim faster on a subsequent race. So think about that. They they got this feedback like you're not doing well, and within an hour, um just because of the way that they explained it to themselves, they were able to sort of shake it off and go, you know what, I can do even better if I get another chance. Uh and I think that the core of that is something that as swim coaches, we really would love to see in the people that we coach, right? We know that uh it is inevitable that they're going to run into bad days, bad races, bad practices. Um we want them to be able to uh not ignore those things, but be able to deal with them and move forward in a positive way and leave the door open to a likely good result in the future. Um so the research that I ended up doing was I I looked at this and I said, you know what, I don't see a lot of coaches in my experience, uh, that are telling swimmers that they went slower than they went. But what I saw a lot, and I will admit that I did it as well, was you know, especially when you got close to a big competition. You know, you have the swimmers at the meet, and you are uh giving them that time twenty-five in warm-up. Um and you really want them to feel confident about how they're gonna do and you know especially sort of your most anxious swimmers have a photographic memory for how they have performed you know I at X Meet I did 12-6 on my 25 and then uh my hundred was 54-3. So um now I'm doing 12-2 and you know that like they've actually like worked out some math and you know so you're you're you're um and I and I saw this a lot from other coaches as well. Sometimes I admit that I would do a little bit of uh spying at a championship meet and I would just hear coaches just giving the most ridiculous times to somebody in a 25 but I I I gathered that they were doing it for similar reasons to why I ended up doing it and that was that they wanted to build confidence in their swimmers. They wanted them not to worry uh they definitely didn't want to tell them that they were going you know slower in a 25 than they had all year. So they were in effect sort of trying the reverse now for reasons of simplicity I only had swimmers race a 100 and they were given faster times than they achieved. But I have to admit I did not get very good results from the study and I didn't really I'm not drawing any conclusions from it. The one conclusion you can draw is that uh and this may be useful to people who are still thinking about given the too fast 25 the swimmers very crucially one of the reasons I I I didn't trust any of the results I got was because many of the swimmers recognized immediately that they were being lied to about times. They thought oh that's ridiculous I didn't go that fast. And so I guess if I were to do it again maybe I would try to hide the time increase maybe I would make it less and I used the same one and a half second per hundred and I just think you know some people were like rightly so in disbelief that they were going a time that was a second and a half faster in you know in practice in a random 100. So uh that was that was uh that was my thesis uh and it was a little bit disappointing but I was excited in terms of the fact that I'd never done research before and I went through the whole IRB process and um had to teach myself how to do statistics uh and many thanks to my wife for all the help that she gave me in putting together the statistics for that thesis. So let's talk a little bit more and I don't want to uh I don't want to give a hundred percent of what I would do when I'm out talking to a team in the next part but I do want to give a little taste of um where we go next in terms of optimism. What I end up talking through uh from this point forward are some some of the categories that uh explanatory style uses to uh talk about the explanations that we give. And so there is uh there's a there's uh explanations that where you assign permanence basically like is this thing is it remember you start with an event and it's an event that you have either a good or bad feeling about right um and permanence is all about how likely do you think that thing is to happen again or how likely do you think it is to continue. You know the word permanence I I think people typically think like you know will go on forever but really in this sense it has to do with uh oh a good thing happened do you think it's gonna happen again uh or a bad thing happened do you think it's going to happen again um then there's uh a category so there's permanence permanent and temporary um are sort of two ends of the spectrum there then there's a category that is really about the environment um you know how what kind of explanations do you tell yourself about the environment are do you think that uh some of what created the event is pervasive is it all around you is it in the air where you are um you know in a in a swim coaching setting this has a lot to do with the kind of things that swimmers uh and coaches tell themselves about what kind of team they're on or what kind of area they're swimming in or what kind of competition they're at you know how pervasive do they feel things are or do they feel that things are very specific do they think that um whatever happened was just kind of a freak occurrence didn't really have to do with where I was or uh my surroundings or the the specific place that I was at that moment um and then finally there is a personal versus external uh explanation so um the the personal explanation is how much of the event do you in your thought process attribute to yourself you know something good happened how much did you have to do with it and on the flip side something bad happened how much do you have to do with it now this one is the number one uh category when I'm talking about this especially with a room full of swim coaches where I see you know people have been sort of staring down at a page and taking notes and all of a sudden some hot heads are popping up because they said did you know is Chris going to suggest here that um you know when something bad happens to a swimmer that uh they should externalize that as much as possible um and what I always tell coaches and I'll give a little uh bit of what I tell to swimmers too is from from a social uh from a social aspect like the way that you relate to other people it's really good especially when you know that you had some responsibility in doing something wrong it's really good to acknowledge that to other people um not doing so I it I can't recommend because uh people aren't gonna like you you know if you just go around uh finding every bad event especially ones that you play that somewhat of a part in and go well got nothing to do with me you know that's not gonna make you a lot of friends that's not gonna make you a lot of allies um and so from that perspective I do not suggest it however when you're working internally when we're talking about sort of your internal thought process here it's actually not very useful to personalize your failures okay because uh as soon as sort of within yourself you are uh taking bad events and going over and over in your mind how it was all your fault it's really paralyzing it it does not give you a lot of energy for change or for moving forward uh it sort of gets you stuck in a point where generally you're just feeling a lot of shame that you screwed up and uh so you know for for coaches um I what I think is important here is that as you start to work on your own optimism that you make sure that you know that you have that kind of uh let's let's use the the buzzword accountability that you that you take responsibility for things interpersonally with other people um and that you acknowledge when you make a mistake and apologize and uh move forward from it but in terms of your own sort of uh self uh self-analysis and self-talk don't spend a lot of time working on that because it's it's going to be counterproductive to the thing that other people are really gonna want to see from you and that you're frankly you're gonna want to do which is uh change and uh make that thing less likely to happen again in the future. I mean you know apologies are great but people love uh people are gonna love uh your your accountability even more when they see that you actually figured out a way to change the thing that uh that that led to that bad event in the in the first place. So that's that's a real crucial part of it and and those three categories I end up going through some examples um end up talking uh through a quick little sort of strategy a quick model for working working through improving your explanations um and a lot of this goes around I think that there are our statements that we end up making or that we even sort of think are yeah you know what that I mean that's that's pretty good um in the process of coaching or uh the process or stuff that athletes reflect back on us that we don't necessarily think of as pessimistic but are in fact um pessimistic and I talk through some of the examples of that and w the crucial thing to understand is um that most people in fact I I would estimate you know it's only uh a few out of a hundred are kind of natural optimists. I know for sure I am not a natural optimist, but that gives me something in common with almost everybody that I meet. Um and there's a kind of a a pretty basic evolutionary argument for that and that is uh especially if you look through human history you know pessimism is is pretty useful uh in uh increasingly sort of life or death type situations the example that I always use when I'm out talking is let's say you know it's uh 20,000 years ago and uh you're you were being chased by a saber-toothed tiger which is sort of a more common occurrence 20,000 years ago than uh say today. I've never been chased by a saber-toothed tiger I don't know anybody who's been chased by a saber-toothed tiger but you don't want to be optimistic in that situation you know you don't want to be saying to yourself you know what I bet if this saber toothed tiger catches me everything's gonna be fine I'm gonna be happy and healthy maybe the maybe I'll take the saber-toothed tiger in as a pet no those are bad explanations you actually want some pessimism in that situation you want to be thinking I will die if I'm caught okay um and so but and so through history we've uh our our day-to-day lives have gotten considerably better as I said very few of us have to worry about saber-tooth tiger attacks however um it's a relatively short time frame for our brains to completely turn things around and so now whatever your life stresses are um chances are you have a lot of things that are very very far from life or death that your brain is still coding like a saber-toothed tiger attack it's not very useful you know um 2050s uh at 200 pace are nothing like a saber-toothed tiger attack you want optimism to make the most out of that set and afterwards um make the most out of that set so um you you it's worth working on but your default in many cases is going to be pessimism because that is what kept your ancestors alive to procreate up to this point. Um but it's just not so useful anymore. And I think crucially another point that that I think swim coaches um ought to know is that especially with younger kids uh pessimism can have some short-term utility uh especially when your mind is is pretty resilient you know you can learn to be pretty pretty hard on yourself and um uh expect a lot expect the worst in a lot of situations and it'll actually you know you'll the the feedback you'll get is oh this is actually a pretty important part of what helps me to get faster. Now that's a dangerous situation because pessimism and I there's plenty of research to back this up but pessimism is not good for you. Okay. Um it uh there's evidence that have uh linked it to heart disease um you know it could be worse than a smoking habit so there's that um there's ep there's uh stronger evidence that link it to things like anxiety and depression which is something that we are seeing a a really dramatic spike uh in especially with younger people um and we know that when when it gets to that stage that somebody's uh truly suffering from a mental illness then we're um th then you know i i i a lot of time and energy uh is required to help people um who have gotten sick and you know uh uh training optimism is not a cure for for depression or anxiety but training optimism can make it less likely that uh that uh you know somebody learns that pessimism is something that works for them and um by uh by not uh learning that pessimism is something that you know they should continue to tap into we can make it less likely uh that they get to the stage where they need uh serious professional help think about uh one of the best ways uh that I found myself explaining positive psychology to coaches is to think about it like prehab for your brain right um you know if if uh if you end up breaking your leg I definitely want you to go see an orthopedic surgeon um uh you know that that's a person you need but uh what can we do to prevent injuries? What can we do uh on the front end to prevent uh mental illness to make it less likely to happen and I think stuff like learned optimism can really help in that regard. Anyway um I hope that you guys have enjoyed listening to my first solo cast. I think uh uh if you're interested in hearing more about this topic please feel free to contact me uh I still uh I've got a bunch of teams that I am visiting in the fall I've still got a little bit of time available um to go to some some more places uh and some of those could be combined with each other based on based on the geography. But uh I hope you guys have learned a little bit about positive psychology. I hope you have some reading uh that you can do if you're a little bit more interested and um please you know send me your feedback on this format if you'd like to see more like this uh if you think uh this was terrible I guess tell me that I'll I'll see I I've learned I've trained my optimism so uh I won't be too hurt by uh by your feedback uh either way so um as always uh I look forward to hearing from you check catch up on my blogs from the past week put a nice one about parents up yesterday I know uh there were a few swim coaches who didn't love it but um I felt it was a pretty important thing that uh that I believe in wholeheartedly and uh continue to follow on Chris DeSantis coaching on Facebook the the website is Chris D coach that's C H R I S D as in DeSantis coach dot com and see you next week